him, but he listened to the melody of her voice, instead of to her
words, so that he did not understand what she was saying. Her quiet,
reserved eyes, however, brought him to his senses; but still he could
not help feeling glad that, as Flamin's friend, he had some claim upon
her attention and her society. It seemed to him as if everything that
she did was done by her for the first time in life; and he would no
doubt have shown a strange embarrassment in her company if the Lord
Chamberlain and his wife and a throng of guests had not come into the
garden and surrounded him and distracted him by their compliments.
Recovering his self-possession, he concealed his real feelings by giving
full play to his faculty for malicious and witty sayings. But though he
succeeded in amusing the company, he displeased Clotilda; for the talk
fell on the topic of women.

"The thing which a girl most easily forgets," said the Lord Chamberlain,
"is how she looks; that is why she is always gazing into a mirror."

"Perhaps that is also the reason," said Victor, "why no woman regards
another as more beautiful than she is. The most that a woman will admit
is that her rival is younger than herself."

Nothing fell upon Clotilda--and this is always found in the best of her
sex--more keenly than satire upon womankind, and though she concealed
the fact that she both endured and despised this sort of wit, she began
to distrust the lips and the heart of the young Englishman, and treated
him during this time with such cold civility, that he had to exaggerate
his wild gaiety in order to conceal the grief that he felt.

But as she was walking at evening in the garden, a loose leaf blew out
of a book that she was holding, and Victor picked it up and read: "On